Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

by Matt Ridley

Overview

The genome's been mapped.
But what does it mean?

Arguably the most significant scientific discovery of the new century, the mapping of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome raises almost as many questions as it answers. Questions that will profoundly impact the way we think about disease, about longevity, and about free will. Questions that will affect the rest of your life.

Genome offers extraordinary insight into the ramifications of this incredible breakthrough. By picking one newly discovered gene from each pair of chromosomes and telling its story, Matt Ridley recounts the history of our species and its ancestors from the dawn of life to the brink of future medicine. From Huntington's disease to cancer, from the applications of gene therapy to the horrors of eugenics, Matt Ridley probes the scientific, philosophical, and moral issues arising as a result of the mapping of the genome. It will help you understand what this scientific milestone means for you, for your children, and for humankind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060894085
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/30/2006
Series:	P.S. Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	49,172
Product dimensions:	7.78(w) x 5.30(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

Matt Ridley is the author of several award-winning books, including Genome, The Agile Gene, and The Red Queen, which have sold more than 800,000 copies in twenty-seven languages worldwide. He lives in England.

Read an Excerpt

CHROMOSOME 1

Life

All forms that perish other forms supply' (By turns we catch the vital breath and die) Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne' They rise' they break' and to that sea return.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

In the beginning was the word. The word proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live. The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The word eventually blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a human brain that could discover and be aware of the word itself.

My porridgy contraption boggles every time I think this thought. In four thousand million years of earth history' I am lucky enough to be alive today. In five million species, I was fortunate enough to be born a conscious human being. Among six thousand million people on the planet, I was privileged enough to be born in the country where the word was discovered. In all of the earth's history, biology and geography, I was born just five years after the moment when, and just two hundred miles from the place where, two members of my own species discovered the structure of DNA and hence uncovered the greatest, simplest and most surprising secret in the universe. Mock my zeal if you wish; consider me a ridiculous materialist for investing such enthusiasm in an acronym. But follow me on a journey back to the very origin of life, and I hope I can convince you of the immensefascination of the word.

'As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life? asked the polymathic poet and physician Erasmus Darwin in 1794. It was a startling guess for the time' not only in its bold conjecture that all organic life shared the same origin, sixty-five years before his grandson Charles' book on the topic, but for its weird use of the word 'filaments'. The secret of life is indeed a thread.

Yet how can a filament make something live? Life is a slippery thing to define, but it consists of two very different skills: the ability to replicate' and the ability to create order. Living things produce approximate copies of themselves: rabbits produce rabbits, dandelions make dandelions. But rabbits do more than that. They eat grass' transform it into rabbit flesh and somehow build bodies of order and complexity from the random chaos of the world. They do not defy the second law of thermodynamics, which says that in a closed system everything tends from order towards disorder, because rabbits are not closed systems. Rabbits build packets of order and complexity called bodies but at the cost of expending large amounts of energy. In Erwin Schrodinger's phrase, living creatures 'drink orderliness' from the environment.

The key to both of these features of life is information. The ability to replicate is made possible by the existence of a recipe' the information that is needed to create a new body. A rabbit's egg carries the instructions for assembling a new rabbit. But the ability to create order through metabolism also depends on information -- the instructions for building and maintaining the equipment that creates the order. An adult rabbit, with its ability to both reproduce and metabolise, is prefigured and presupposed in its living filaments in the same way that a cake is prefigured and presupposed in its recipe. This is an idea that goes right back to Aristotle, who said that the 'concept' of a chicken is implicit in an egg, or that an acorn was literally 'informed' by the plan of an oak tree. When Aristotle's dim perception of information theory, buried under generations of chemistry and physics, re-emerged amid the discoveries of modern genetics' Max Delbruck joked that the Greek sage should be given a posthumous Nobel prize for the discovery of DNA.

The filament of DNA is information, a message written in a code of chemicals' one chemical for each letter. It is almost too good to be true' but the code turns out to be written in a way that we can understand. just like written English, the genetic code is a linear language, written in a straight line. just like written English' it is digital, in that every letter bears the same importance. Moreover' the language of DNA is considerably simpler than English, since it has an alphabet of only four letters, conventionally known as A, C, G and T.

Now that we know that genes are coded recipes, it is hard to recall how few people even guessed such a possibility. For the first half of the twentieth century, one question reverberated unanswered through biology: what is a gene? It seemed almost impossibly mysterious. Go back not to 19 5 3' the year of the discovery of DNA's symmetrical structure, but ten years further, to 1943. Those who will do most to crack the mystery' a whole decade later, are working on other things in 1943. Francis Crick is working on the design of naval mines near Portsmouth. At the same time James Watson is just enrolling as an undergraduate at the precocious age of fifteen at the University of Chicago; he is determined to devote his life to ornithology. Maurice Wilkins is helping to design the atom bomb in the United States. Rosalind Franklin is studying the structure of coal for the British government.

In Auschwitz in 1943, Josef Mengele is torturing twins to death in a grotesque parody of scientific inquiry.

Table of Contents

Preface
1 Life
2 Species
3 History
4 Fate
5 Environment
6 Intelligence
7 Instinct
X and Y Conflict
8 Self-Interest
9 Disease
10 Stress
11 Personality
12 Self-Assembly
13 Pre-History
14 Immortality
15 Sex
16 Memory
17 Death
18 Cures
19 Prevention
20 Politics
21 Eugenics
22 Free Will
Bibliography and Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Sarah B. Hrdy

Clever, up to the minute informative, and an altogether spellbinding read. Ripley does just what a first-grade journalist should do: get it right, make it interesting, and wisely put it all in perspective.
—(Sarah B. Hrdy, author of Mother Nature)

James Watson

A lucid and exhilarating romp through our 23 human chromosomes that lets us see how nature and nurture combine to make us human.
—(James Watson)

Abraham Verghese

With riveting anecdotes, clever analogies and compelling writing, Matt Ridley makes the human genome come alive for us. I was left in awe at the wonder of the human body, and the scientists who unravel its mysteries.
— (Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner)

Foreword

When I began to write this book, the human genome was still a largely an unexplored landscape. Some eight thousand human genes had already been roughly located, and I mention a few of the most interesting ones in the book, but the rapid acceleration towards the reading of the entire genome still lay in the future. Now, only a little over a year later, that gargantuan task is complete. Scientists all over the world have deciphered the entire human genome, written down its contents and distributed them on the internet to all who wish to read them. You can now download from the net the near-complete instructions for how to build and run a human body.

The revolution was swift. In early 1998, the publicly funded scientists who made up the Human Genome Project still predicted that they would take another seven years at least to read the entire human genome, and they had barely read 10% of it by then. Then suddenly a joker was thrown on the table. Craig Venter, a flamboyant and impatient scientist now working in the private sector, announced that he was forming a company and would do the job by 2001 and for a fraction of the cost: less than $200 million.

Venter had made such threats before, and he had a habit of delivering results. In 1991 he had invented a quick way to find human genes when everybody said it could not be done. Then in 1995 he received a withering reply to his request for a government grant to map a whole bacterial genome using a new `shotgun' technique. The technique would never work, said the officials. The letter arrived when the job was already almost complete. So it would be a foolish person who bet against Venter a third time. The race was on. The public project was reorganised and refocused; extra funding was poured in and a goal was set to complete a first draft of the entire genome in June 2000. Venter soon set his sights on the same deadline.

On June 26, 2000, President Clinton in the White House and Tony Blair in Downing Street, simultaneously announced that the rough draft was complete. This is therefore an astonishing moment in human history: the first time in the story of life on earth that a species has read its own recipe. For the human genome is nothing less than the instructions for how to build and run a human body. Hidden within it, as I have tried to show in the book, lie thousands of genes and millions of other sequences that constitute a treasure trove of philosophical secrets. Most of the research into human genes is driven by the urgent need to find cures for both inherited diseases and much commoner diseases like cancer and heart disease, whose origin is abetted or enhanced by genes. A cure for cancer would, we now know, be virtually impossible if we did not understand the role of cancer genes and cancer-suppressing genes in the progress of tumours.

Yet there is much more to genetics than medicine. As I have tried to show, the genome contains secret messages from both the distant and the recent past—from when we were single-celled creatures and from when we took up cultural habits such as dairy farming. It also contains clues to ancient philosophical conundrums, not least the question of whether and how our actions are determined and what is this curious sensation called free will.

The completion of the genome project has done little to change this picture, but it is gradually adding more examples to the themes I explore in this book. As I wrote, I was conscious that the world was rapidly changing; genetic knowledge was exploding all about me in the scientific literature. I could do no more than capture the first glimpse of some of these exciting debates. But many great insights still lie in the future. Science, I believe, is the search for new mysteries, rather than the cataloguing of old facts. I have little doubt that there will be astounding surprises in store for us over the next few years. We are realising for the first time just how little we know about ourselves.

What I could not have foreseen is how dramatically the debate over genetics would have invaded the public media. With controversy raging over genetically modified organisms and with speculation growing about cloning and genetic engineering, the public is demanding the right to be heard. Quite correctly it does not want these decisions left only to the experts. But most geneticists are too busy mining nuggets of intellectual gold from the laboratory to give up their time to explaining their science to the public. So it falls to commentators like me to try to translate the arcane stories of genes into something more like entertainment than education.

I am an optimist. As will be clear from this book, I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer's disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas—these seem to me to be immense blessings. It is true that genetics also brings the threat of new dangers—unequal insurance premiums, new forms of germ warfare, unanticipated side-effects of genetic engineering—but most of these are either easily dealt with or extremely far-fetched. So I cannot subscribe to the fashionable pessimism about science and nor can I warm to the idea of a world that turns its back on science and the unending assault on new forms of ignorance.

Matt Ridley July 2000

Editorial Reviews

This national bestseller is one of the most accessible and lively books available on the topic of the human genome. Taking each of the 23 chromosomes in turn, Matt Ridley, author of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, tells stories of the genes and their meaning for us -- blending history, science, medicine, philosophy, and ethics.

bn.com

A superb writer whose exquisite, often moving descriptions of life's designs remind me of the best work of the late Lewis Thomas....He crafts some of the clearest explanations of complex biological processes that I have encountered. What's more, he captures their slippery beauty.
— Washington Post Book World

Susan Okie

Mr. Ridley provides not only a fascinating tour of the human genome but a persuasive argument against the skeptics of biotech research. If you want to catch a glimpse of the biotech century that is now dawning, and how it will make life better for us all, Genome is an excellent place to start.
— Wall Street Journal

Ronald Bailey

HSoon we'll know what's in our genes: next year, the Human Genome Project will have its first-draft map of our 23 chromosomes. Ridley (The Red Queen; The Origins of Virtue) anticipates the genomic news with an inventively constructed, riveting exposition of what we already know about the links between DNA and human life. His inviting prose proposes "to tell the story of the human genome... chromosome by chromosome, by picking a gene from each." That story begins with the basis of life on earth, the DNA-to-RNA-to-protein process (chapter one, "Life," and also chromosome one); the evolution of Homo sapiens (chromosome two, which emerged in early hominids when two ape chromosomes fused); and the discovery of genetic inheritance (which came about in part thanks to the odd ailment called alkaptonuria, carried on chromosome three). Some facts about your life depend entirely on a single gene--for example, whether you'll get the dreadful degenerative disease Huntington's chorea, and if so, at what age (chromosome four, hence chapter four: "Fate"). But most facts about you are products of pleiotropy, "multiple effects of multiple genes," plus the harder-to-study influences of culture and environment. (One asthma-related gene--but only one--hangs out on chromosome five.) The brilliant "whistle-stop tour of some... sites in the genome" passes through "Intelligence," language acquisition, embryology, aging, sex and memory before arriving at two among many bugbears surrounding human genetic mapping: the uses and abuses of genetic screening, and the ongoing debate on "genetic determinism" and free will. Ridley can explain with equal verve difficult moral issues, philosophical quandaries and technical biochemistry; he distinguishes facts from opinions well, and he's not shy about offering either. Among many recent books on genes, behavior and evolution, Ridley's is one of the most informative. It's also the most fun to read. Agent, Felicity Bryan. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Written in 23 chapters corresponding to the 23 pairs of chromosomes comprising the human genome, this is an engrossing account of the genetic history of our species. Each chapter focuses on a newly discovered gene on each chromosome, tracing its genetic contribution to such areas as human intelligence, personality, sexual behavior, and susceptibility to disease. Ridley (The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature) is a zoologist-turned-science writer. As the Human Genome Project nears completion (the first findings are expected to be released February 2000), this book will be particularly relevant to lay readers, providing insight into how far we have come and where we are heading in the understanding of our genetic heritage. Recommended for public and academic libraries.--Leila Fernandez, Steacie Science Lib., York Univ., Toronto Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Genome is a splendid introduction to some important science. It deserves to attract a wide and enthusiastic readership...
—The Times Literary Supplement

Philip Kitcher

[M]uch of Ridley's remarkable book is focused on a higher plane of pure intellectual discovery. It is a nearly jargon-free expedition that hops from one human chromosome to the next (23 in all) in search of the most delightful stories. Even practicing geneticists -- apt to view the genome as a boring research tool -- will come away with a greater sense of wonder at the hidden secrets in the text.
—The New York Times Book Review

Silver